Richard Onyango (Kenyan, born 1960) Kangalika on Broken Road in 1969
Provenance : Provenance Acquired directly from the artist in 2007. Richard Onyango is one of Africa's most important artists. Made famous by Andre Magnin and Jean Pigozzi in the 1980's he had worked as a drummer in a band and later as a bus conductor before becoming a full time painter. Fascinated by buses and vehicles including trains from a young age, Onyango, with his near perfect powers of visual recall, recreated buses and other vehicles that he had seen as a boy. This painting is one of the finest example from this long-running series and one of the artist's favourite paintings. Onyango has long been fascinated by the concept of development. Excited by the vision of his country and continent harnessing and embracing technology to increase prosperity for its citizens. Central to this is a reverence for the machine and its maintenance. The bus named Kangalika once glimpsed by the nine year old Onyango is not a sentimental painting, it is a kind of hymn to the bus driver and his machine's struggle against the wilderness and a commentary on the price of infrastructural neglect.
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